Navarr's Tech Side

I love applications that fill in where hardware fails, but this one is really taking the cake!  Geosense for Windows gives you the capabilities of a GPS sensor in your computer (but without the actual hardware!)  It uses Google Location Services to triangulate your location and provide your coordinates to applications that request them.

Unfortunately, not many applications use this type of data (yet) but Long Zheng and Rafael Rivera are hoping that with this new default driver for PCs without GPS, that many more developers will embrace the creation of geo-location in desktop applications.

Continue Reading for Code Snippets

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Last Night I was working on a job site, and I had checked into it using Foursquare (twice, the first time a typo).  I was wondering if there was a way to undo a check-in, or something similar.  So, of course, I texted “help” to 50500 (the US Shortcode for Foursquare) and I got back the following message:

2 Vicinite alerts/wk, tones/video clips: $0.49-$9.99/mth+ msg&data rates may aply.  Visit vicinite.com/index2.html or 8666443345. STOP 2quit.

Wait, what?  That has nothing to do with Foursquare at all.  What is going on here?  So, I decided to google the shortcode for more information, and found out its ALSO used for Contxts, another service I used.  Just to make sure, I texted “David” to 50500 and what do I know?  His business card was texted right back to me, with the sender labeled as “Foursquare” due to me having set the number as Foursquare’s in my address book.

This is kind of fishy, in my opinion.  How, and Why do these three services share the same shortcode number?  They seem to have nothing to do with each other, either.

So then… how do they pull it off?

Well, congratulations me.  I think?  I guess?  Saa.  Either way, I’m now going to be a contributor for MacDavid Pro (which will be renamed, just nobody knows to what yet.)

Which is all well and good, except I don’t write much of anything ever, and the few times I do I have trouble including media and pictures and formatting it the way I want to.  Bleh.

Well, lets hope I do better as a contributor to that blog than I have been doing for this one, eh?

Toying around with the interface for publishing blog posts in Microsoft Word 2010 Beta.

It truly is fascinating, but I don’t think it’ll manage to replace Windows Live Writer, which definitely has a much better, and more blog-specific user interface.

Full Disclosure: I do not personally know if any companies do what I’ve written about in this post.  These are merely some thoughts I had on how to make money by creating a License for others to use.

It has been often discussed and is basically a known fact that the future of the world is Open Source.  As technology increases, more and more people want to contribute, and everyone wants to see their idea expand before them without having to do any of the hard work themselves.  This is where Open Source comes in.  Open Source is having the code available to all, so that others can patch it, can contribute, and can make your idea come to life whether or not you still want to work on it.  But that isn’t the topic of today’s post.

With a boost of popularity in the Open Source direction, there is a new seldom-thought of business that has opened up the doors of possibility – Licensing.  Open Source users want their ideas expanded, but not stolen, and this is where Licensing comes in.

You see all over the internet different licenses, GNU, MIT, Apache, Creative Commons – and personally, I don’t know a thing about any of them.  But if the companies that control them wanted to make money off of their licenses, it would be simple – without even charging the creators of content a penny.

The revenue stream lies in protecting the license.  Lets say you’re creative commons, and a absolutely MAGICAL deviantArt artist uses your license for their work, lets say BY-NC-ND, meaning that use of the picture has to be attributed to the artist, and it can’t be used commercially nor can derivative works be made from it without the Artist’s expressed consent.  One day, the artist sits down to watch a movie, and sees her wonderful work in the background – Her License has been violated.

If you, Creative Commons don’t do anything to help her, then people don’t believe in your license.  Less people use it, and suddenly it isn’t so popular.  But if you take on the case, pursue legal action, and sue over it for her, giving her a decent percentage of the profit and keeping the rest, then the artist got her retribution, and you as an organization just made money.  Since you were so eager to defend the artist’s rights, more and more people use your license to protect their work.

Is this unethical?  No, of course not.  The law is on your side.  The author said that their work could only be used in this way, and it was violated.  You’re protecting the rights of the people, and making money while you’re at it.

Well, all that looks official.  It seems we’ve now officially moved onto a Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog from our previous place at Blogger.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Blogger and all, but I wanted a lot more control, and a lot more experience with Wordpress.

So, the new blog should be here to stay.  I’ve made it so that old links should continue to work.  If you have any problems with them, please go ahead and post what they are here, and I’ll work my hardest to fix them.

As for how awful the older posts look, I won’t be doing anything to rectify them.  I’m sorry but its much too much work and I’m much too lazy to go through and fix things such as bad images and the whole Digg button thing to make all the posts look the same.  They’ll be buried in the archive soon enough.

I was just thinking, as I read over my twitter stream, that one of the best features for Gmail is indeed the threading capabilities.  To have all of your messages that pertain to a certain subject/discussion listed as a thread with individual messages; allows for much better message management, and makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for.

But one way to make this even easier, would be an introduction of a new header into emails:

X-Thread-ID

This would be the MD5 of the subject and timestamp, or something along those lines to generate an ID that would be very or completely unlikely to accidentally be recreated.

This would make it super easy for mail clients and servers alike to keep track of threads.

It’s ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Originally uploaded by Navarr

Although my attempt did unfortunately fail.

What I was trying to do, you see, was Dual Boot my laptop into windows 7 on an external hard drive via USB. I didn’t know where the power adapter for the HDD enclosure board was; so I had to plug the hard drive and the HDD enclosure into the PSU of the crappy dell computer.

Smart Vista Clock
Originally uploaded by Navarr

Smart Clock on Windows Vista. Let’s me know that DST is ending soon, that way the sudden change in time won’t surprise me. Nice little feature; quite possibly useful.

The idea is to take your common every-day feed readers that pull RSS, ATOM, OPML or whatever else from the internet, and combine their information.  To this, we come up with a feature list:

• Ability to Synchronize Read status of News Items
• Ability to Synchronize “Star” (or “Important”) status of News Items
• Ability to Synchronize Folders for News Items
• Ability to add/remove/edit a Feed Subscription (including setting an alias for the feed)
• Ability to Synchronize “Tags”

This would allow us to do with RSS feeds what we do with email when we use IMAP.

Things like Google’s “Share” feature could be simplified as a tag “special:share”.

What do you think?